Fifteen years ago, during the political convulsion known as “Occupy Wall Street,” I wrote a column for the Daily Inter Lake declaring: “Don’t be afraid to say it: ‘We are the 1 percent.’”
Of course, I wasn’t wealthy then, and I’m not wealthy now. I wrote at the time about driving a worn-out Ford Windstar, raising three children in a hundred-year-old house with faulty wiring, and wondering how we would ever afford retirement. But I also recognized something that many Americans instinctively understood: A country that begins dividing itself by class is a country already drifting toward collapse.
Just as decent Americans are morally obligated to stand against racism and antisemitism, I believed then – and believe now – that Americans have a duty to stand against the demonization of success itself. Once a society decides that achievement is evidence of exploitation, envy becomes a political weapon. History shows where that road leads.
For years, conservatives who warned that the Democratic Party was drifting toward socialism were mocked as alarmists. “Nobody wants socialism,” we were told. “That’s just fearmongering.”
Really?
Today, one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, openly identifies as a democratic socialist and says, “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” Bernie Sanders built two presidential campaigns around class resentment directed at millionaires and billionaires. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made hostility toward capitalism fashionable among younger progressives. “Eat the rich” has become a cultural slogan rather than a fringe outburst.
Meanwhile, proposals once considered radical – wealth taxes, government-run industries, student debt transfers, rent freezes, expanded federal dependency, and punitive taxation aimed explicitly at “rich neighborhoods” – are increasingly normalized inside Democratic politics.
This is no longer traditional liberalism. It is class politics.
And class politics always requires villains.
So where does this lead? Do you remember that scene from “Dr. Zhivago” when Yuri returns to his family’s elegant home in Moscow after World War I and discovers it has been expropriated by the new Soviet government and divided up for 13 families?
That’s where it leads. Class warfare is not just a communist slogan; it is the formula for a country without a future.
Imagine that Mayor Mamdani has his way and starts adding taxes on high-end real estate in New York City. It’s not quite the same as confiscating property for the poor, but it has the same effect. Cities that treat investment and success as social problems eventually discover that productive people and capital are mobile. There will be a flood of wealthy executives leaving the city, leaving middle- and lower-income families to fend for themselves as jobs and investment decline precipitously.
Of the current round of politicians, Graham Platner, running as a Democrat for Senate in Maine, may be the clearest example of where this rhetoric leads. Platner frames politics almost entirely as a struggle between ordinary Americans and a corrupt alliance of billionaires, corporations, and political elites. In a recent speech alongside Bernie Sanders, he declared:
We are going to take it back from the corporations that seek profit no matter the cost, from the billionaires for whom greed is the point, and from corrupt politicians like Susan Collins.
Later in the speech, Platner promised:
We can take back the wealth that belongs to us.
And directly echoing the Occupy Wall Street radicals of 2011, he proclaimed:
We can have an economy and a government that works for the 99% and not just the 1%.
This is not the language of traditional liberalism. It is the language of class conflict – dividing Americans into exploiters and exploited, villains and victims.
And it is a lie. If 99% of the country didn’t approve of their government, they could change it in a heartbeat. But Platner is wrong. Most Americans still believe in capitalism, property rights, and upward mobility. Still, increasingly vocal factions within the Democratic coalition view those principles with suspicion if not contempt.
You would think that 250 years of prosperity and success would make the case for staying the course. America was never built on equality of outcome. It was built on equality before the law and the belief that success was something to admire, not resent. The American Dream does not promise that every citizen will become wealthy. It promises only that every citizen has the freedom to try.
The moment we abandon that principle – the moment we divide Americans permanently into oppressors and victims, exploiters and exploited – we cease to be a republic of citizens and become a nation of competing grievances.
That road has been traveled before. It never ends where its advocates promise.
And that is why, 15 years later, I still stand with the 1 percent.
